


Never Like This

by officialbookwizard



Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types, Percy Jackson and the Olympians - Rick Riordan, The Heroes of Olympus - Rick Riordan
Genre: F/F, Lesbian, Pride, Theyna - Freeform, this started out as a beginning of another and turned into a rant and now i have this
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-13
Updated: 2020-07-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:01:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,500
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25245808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/officialbookwizard/pseuds/officialbookwizard
Summary: Reyna and Thalia both have liked girls before, but never like this.
Relationships: Thalia Grace/Reyna Avila Ramírez-Arellano
Comments: 6
Kudos: 48





	Never Like This

Reyna was seven years old when she met Eve. Seven, with eyes that searched for escapes and a mind tormented by the ghosts of her ancestors. The girl was tall and blonde- exotic and rare in Reyna’s school, in her life. Reyna couldn’t explain what she thought when she looked into the girl’s eyes and felt drawn to her. 

Reyna didn’t know what she felt when she found herself desperately trying to befriend her. She was small and awkward, her short ponytail of choppily cut black hair constantly in her face. Reyna did everything she could do to make Eve like her, but it never felt enough. Everything she did, she always felt pathetic and lame.

Eve was a practical ray of sunshine, friends with everyone, but Reyna knew she would never be good enough. Who was she to try to talk to this girl? More importantly, why did she feel like she had to be good enough? She didn’t feel like this with any of her other friends. 

The conclusion she came to was that none of her other friends were as elite and amazing as Eve. Reyna was a small fish in a pond that just got a lot bigger.

She was only seven years old. It felt like a punch in the gut. 

\-----------

At seven, Thalia was made of determination and mischief, stubbornly loyal to her friends and new baby brother. She was the toughest girl of her age, and she made sure everyone else knew it. She was the one who everyone came to with their problems, because they could trust her to help them. She was the one who would beat up anybody who dared hurt her friends.

She felt more protective of one than of the others- a girl named Lily. Lily was the smartest girl Thalia knew. She planned on becoming president, and there was nothing that could stop her.

Thalia believed this, and she certainly wasn’t going to do anything to stop her. In fact, Lily promised to name Thalia her vice president if she made it. But Lily never let anybody say “if.” It was always “when.” She knew she would make it. She could do anything.

Thalia made it her mission to become as close to Lily as possible. After all, a president and her vice president have to work together. The two became joined at the hip, able to finish each other’s sentences before they even left their mouths.

She began to notice everything about Lily and try to imitate her in any way possible. If anybody said a word against her, they would inexplicably have a black eye the next day. Thalia was a fireball, and she used all her fire to help Lily.

One day, a thought popped into her head, a thought she wasn’t supposed to have. She didn’t know what to make of it. Everything she felt for Lily was friendship, until her brain let one sentence through.

_ I could marry her someday. _

Everything else Thalia thought, she could explain. But this? Why was she thinking that? She wasn’t a boy- she couldn’t think that. It just didn’t happen.

It confused her to no end.

\-----------

At twelve, Reyna was more confident, at least on the outside. She pushed her insecurities deep into her brain, where only in her darkest thoughts could she reach them. She was safe. She and Hylla were safe on Circe’s island, where, maybe, they would one day learn magic.

It wasn’t perfect, and Reyna spent too many nights in a dark, nightmarish place she could never escape until morning, filled with things she was sure never happened. She became practiced in the art of composing herself, hiding her feelings where nobody could ever guess them. Otherwise, it was heaven.

Circe’s spa was a palace. There was no other way to put it. Reyna and all the other attendants lived in a palace with halls of marble, filled with beautiful things. And among the beautiful things, within the walls of paradise, was a girl by the name of Natalie. 

Natalie was only a year older than Reyna, but she had already started learning magic. She had almost no hair, but what she did have was a pleasant light brown, almost the exact color of her skin and eyes. Natalie argued that the future had no time for hairstyling. Reyna agreed with her, but knew she could never bear to cut her hair so short. It went a little past her shoulders, and she liked it that way. 

Natalie was one of those people with a smile that was contagious. She had a witty remark to everything that could be said. She was eager to learn new things and always shared random facts she’d found. Reyna couldn’t quite explain why her stomach did a backflip every time Natalie talked, or why her brain went blank whenever she tried to have a conversation with her. 

Reyna hadn’t grown out of her insecurities much, only learned to hide them. Her limbs were knobbly and awkward, and her soft features were strange on her angled face. Her hair, which she wore in two braids, looked childish, but it wasn’t long enough to put in one braid and she couldn’t stand to have it in her face. 

She tripped over air and stuttered when she hadn’t had time to plan out what she was going to say. Her hands were constantly in motion, fiddling with her belt, her hair, anything in sight. She felt stupid around all the graceful, eloquent sorceresses who could chant spells from books flawlessly, while she was dyslexic and read slowly and clumsily.

Reyna never felt as self conscious around any of the other attendants as she did around Natalie. She wasn’t sure why. By this time, she had forgotten completely about Eve in Puerto Rico. Had she not, she would have noticed a pattern. 

She could listen to Natalie talk for hours, and felt, once again, that she’d met an unattainable dream of a person, someone Reyna could hope to be like, but would never succeed. Reyna would never be as good as her. She felt hopeless. 

It was around this point when Reyna started to try to force herself to be less self conscious. She made herself more assertive, refusing to let herself shrink into the background like she had always done before. It took practice, but soon her very existence was challenging people. 

The awkward, gangly twelve year old who had once stood in her sister’s shadow started to approach the spa’s customers and talk to them, convincing them to stay. There was no charmspeak in her slow, stuttery voice, but her way of talking soon became so fluent and graceful that she was always one of the attendants on hand when a new girl appeared from one shipwreck or another. 

She was always nervous around Natalie, no matter what she did. It was something she didn’t think she’d ever be able to stop. She still wasn’t sure what she was feeling, but gone was the shame that came with it, the thoughts that, no matter what she did, she would never be good enough. She  _ knew  _ she was good enough, because she had made it that way.

She didn’t know what she felt, and she knew she would almost certainly never find out, but she could live with this if it meant living with her new Reyna, the Reyna that wasn’t afraid.

\-----------

Twelve year old Thalia didn’t have a home. She didn’t have any family. All ties had been cut when she ran away. But she was, as always, a protector. She had nothing, but she had Luke and Annabeth, who she would defend with her final breath.

She had nothing, but she had a new family now. 

Before she died, she knew what she was. She was the sister who had failed Jason. She wasn’t going to let Annabeth, her new little sister, down in the same way. She was still a fighter, and she would fight for her new siblings.

When she woke up, she did so feeling relatively the same as when she died in the first place, albeit a bit more confused about how old she was. When she went to Annabeth’s school, fifteen and a half, born seventeen years ago, and stuck in the body of a twelve year old, was when she came to one conclusion: she liked girls.

It was quite surprising she never knew this before, but she never thought of it as possible. Her mother never bothered to teach her, and she grew up in a conservative community that already hated her enough for being different from them. 

In a school full of girls, she was bound to come to this conclusion sooner or later, but it took her a while. After all, she found herself attracted to the fifteen year olds, given that was, more or less, her age. It was, however, halfway through the year before she even met any of them. She was all around uncomfortable trying to befriend anyone. She was mentally too old for the twelve year olds, yet felt too young for the older girls. 

However, somewhere along the way, she figured it out. Thalia wasn’t sure what exactly was the one incident after which she realised it, but it made sense to her. It was comfortable to have a label she could be sure of, one that wouldn’t make things worse for her even if she wasn’t sure. 

Maybe she had some certainty about who she was after all. 

Months after waking up from the tree, she found herself standing before Artemis, ready to take her vow. She didn’t mind swearing off men. The only doubts she had were about leaving her cousin to shoulder a prophecy alone. But she could do this.

And she did. It was the most freeing decision Thalia had ever made. She had always hated the idea of settling down to live in one place, and she hated the idea of being alone even more. This was the best decision she could have made.

Thalia didn’t feel anything for any of the girls in the hunt, though many of them were lesbians just like her. They were her sisters- people with whom she could argue, laugh, and play dumb pranks under the dim light of the moon and stars. She had found another new family, and she wasn’t going to mess this one up. 

To be with people who shared her experiences and feelings was strange, yet pleasant. It made her feel like she was a part of something. It made her feel seen.

\-----------

By the time Reyna was fifteen, she had risen to the top of the ranks in New Rome. She had been praetor for six months by the time her partner, at eighteen, had stepped down. Many wanted the job, but the people wanted Jason Grace. Reyna approved of their choice- it was even her shield that Jason was raised upon.

She wasn’t sure what she felt about him. They had been friends for a while, but were never close. Over several months of praetorship, however, they developed a deep bond, able to work seamlessly with each other. 

They soon were best friends, joined at the hip as they presided over New Rome with ease. Half the camp was shipping them. 

Did Reyna like Jason? She didn’t know the answer to that, no matter how many times she went over the question in her brain. She enjoyed his company, for sure. They knew each other better than just about anyone else in the world did. He was always the one she sought out when she felt lonely, and vice versa. They had thousands of inside jokes.

She supposed she must like him, then. Everyone described liking someone as butterflies inside of you and feeling like you wanted to kiss them. When she thought of Jason, she thought of him with happiness, all the good memories of their friendship. She didn’t feel any butterflies, and she certainly couldn’t picture herself kissing him. Maybe that was just because they’d been such good friends for so long. She really did like his company, though, and she could do a lot worse. Reyna decided she liked him.

Nothing came of it, naturally. Jason didn’t like her back, but it didn’t bother her as much as she had thought it would. People had always described it as heartbreaking when you aren’t liked back. Why didn’t she feel like that? Why was she fine?

She contemplated for a second that maybe she didn’t like him like she thought. However, she quickly dismissed that theory. It wasn’t natural for a girl and a boy to be so close without liking each other at least a little, after all. Besides, other than this, she had never had feelings for a boy in her life. It wasn’t possible that she couldn’t have had any crushes by this point in her life. Maybe she was broken. This didn’t make sense.

Her life was complicated. This, she decided, was more so.

\-----------

Thalia was seventeen when she met Reyna.

And that was when her world stopped.

Her hunters, her new sisters, had captured this girl she didn’t know, and soon Thalia found herself a captive instead. Reyna was strong, she was powerful, she was assertive. She knew what she was doing, and she seemed like she did even when she didn’t. She wasn’t scared. There was also the added plus that she was the most beautiful person Thalia had ever seen. Reyna was made of fire and fury, a force of nature never to meddle with, and Thalia knew almost immediately what her type was.

After Reyna left San Juan, she and Thalia were pen pals. Nothing in Thalia’s life could compare to the sheer excitement she felt every time she saw a letter from Reyna in the mail. She studied each one for a long time, sometimes hours, thinking about Reyna. She looked at each one as more and more insight into Reyna and how she thought, and with each one she felt herself fall for her more and more.

But the letters weren’t enough, not for Thalia. She started finding every excuse she could to visit Camp Jupiter, even if only for an hour, just so she could see her favorite Roman praetor.

Reyna always seemed pleased to see her, but Thalia never knew what was going on in Reyna’s head. Reyna had mastered the art of keeping her emotions carefully concealed, and she would only show them when she wanted to. Thalia doubted Reyna saw her as any more than a friend, and she wouldn’t press her any further. She’d set her boundaries, and she certainly wasn’t going to overstep them now.

Thalia had spent her entire life stepping back. And now, she was going to have to do it again.

\-----------

When Reyna left San Juan, sixteen and plagued by awful memories, she didn’t think about Thalia. She didn’t think about those startling blue eyes and the way she led the Hunters with ease and, to make a pun, grace.

She was busy thinking about the Athena Parthenos, the rise of Gaea, and the memories of the crime she could never escape. She didn’t have time for the lieutenant of Artemis to occupy any space in her mind. She had the world on her shoulders, and she wasn’t going to let it down.

By the time the first letter came, the wave had passed. Reyna could breathe again. She could sit down in peace and read the letter from Thalia.

It was a long letter, talking casually to Reyna as if she were a friend Thalia had known for a long time. Reyna had only had a good friend once, and it was with Jason. She thanked both Jupiter and Zeus for the Grace siblings- she honestly couldn’t care less which version, as long as it got the job done.

Thalia and Reyna exchanged letters for months after Viejo San Juan. It was hard to tell at which point Reyna started to fall for the girl she saw within the pages. Maybe it happened slowly; she wasn’t sure. However, soon she found herself eagerly anticipating each piece of correspondence, reading and rereading them with a ridiculous smile on her face that she didn’t even want to push away. 

Even that wasn’t enough to clue Reyna in that she had a thing for Thalia. It was when the Hunters first started popping in, however, that she started to think about it.

At first, it seemed impossible. After all, she had liked Jason. She couldn’t like Thalia. Besides, Thalia was Jason’s  _ sister _ . That was just weird.

Then Thalia visited again. And again. And again. Reyna started to notice subtle changes in the way she was acting towards the lieutenant. She could never quite tear her eyes away from Thalia’s. The color was vivid and intense, an ocean and a sky in one. 

And whenever Thalia casually put an arm around Reyna, she didn’t tense up. Thalia was the type of person to always have an arm or a hand on or around someone else. Reyna usually hated that. But now, she didn’t flinch or jump back like she always did. There was something comforting about Thalia’s touch.

And let alone all the times Thalia smiled at her… That smile sent every emotion Reyna could feel into her gut. She loved it. 

Before she knew it, Thalia was her favorite person in the world. Reyna had accepted that she had a crush on Thalia, but she had also accepted that nothing would come of it. Thalia was a friend, a friend she wouldn’t risk losing by telling her how she felt.

\-----------

It was June first. Reyna would remember that day. The Hunters were visiting, and all was going as smoothly as things can go in a Roman military camp.

That was until Thalia came in, a pride flag draped over her shoulders like a cape, and proclaimed that she and the Hunters were throwing a mini pride in New Rome and there was nothing Reyna could do to stop them.

She wouldn’t have tried even had she been able to. So, Thalia and the lesbian gang got to work, plastering flags everywhere and decorating the city. No identity was left unrepresented- Thalia had flags for them all. Reyna only recognized very few of them. She wasn’t even sure which flag she liked for herself. 

Thalia, however, knew all of them. She took Reyna down through the town, pointing out and explaining every one of them. Reyna had never known that there were so many labels. It gave her confidence that, someday, she could find one that fit her.

Thalia, a lesbian, was particularly knowledgeable about lesbian flags, as there must have been at least ten types scattered through the city. Reyna didn’t know how one group could have so many flags, but she loved the passion in Thalia’s eyes as she talked about them, the smile on her face. 

At this point, she couldn’t take it any longer. She was going to shove it down, like she always had before. But she had another option, a really  _ bad  _ option.

Every cell in her body was telling her not to do anything. She was going to keep her neutral expression and continue her day like her heart wasn’t burning to leap out of her chest. She was planning on letting her crush die out. But she knew, somehow, that she couldn’t.

When she finally confessed to Thalia, at that moment, standing in the center of town under the rainbow flag, it was because she didn’t have any brain cells left. If she had, she would have hesitated, questioning her moves and wondering if Thalia would hate her after.

Instead, she blurted it out, not bothering to restrain herself. The words felt strange in her mouth, like she wasn’t supposed to be saying them. It was the best feeling in the world, yet the most terrifying.

Thalia stared at her for a second, and for one heartbreaking moment Reyna thought she was going to scream at her or walk away. There weren’t many good reactions. Reyna was starting to regret saying anything at all.

Instead, Thalia came closer to her and engulfed her in the tightest hug she could have. She sounded like she was choking on words. Reyna didn’t blame her- she wasn’t sure she could speak right now, either. 

They stood there for a few minutes before Reyna was able to get some brain cells back. Apparently, so was Thalia.

“Me too,” she said into Reyna’s ear.

Reyna realised then that people were staring. So what? She was done being the girl who hides everything. Right now, it was just her and Thalia. She knew things were far from perfect in her world. But this tiny moment felt right.

And she wouldn’t have it any other way.


End file.
